I am the president of Metis Strategy, a CIO advisory firm that I founded in 2001. I have advised many of the best chief information officers at multi-billion dollar corporations in the United States and abroad. I've written for the Wall Street Journal, CIO Magazine, CIO Insight, Information Week and several other periodicals. I am also the author of Implementing World Class IT Strategy: How IT Can Drive Organizational Innovation (Wiley Press, September 2014) and of World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs (Wiley Press, December 2009), a book on leading IT practices that has sold over 15,000 copies around the world. Since 2008, I have moderated a widely listened to podcast entitled “The Forum on World Class IT,” which features a wide array of IT thought-leaders, and is available at www.forumonworldclassit.com on a biweekly basis. I have been the keynote speaker at a host of corporate conferences and universities in the US, Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, Spain, China, India, Australia, and Saudi Arabia. You can reach me at peter.high [at] metisstrategy.com or on Twitter @WorldClassIT

For The Largest Not-For-Profit MOOC, edX, Experimentation Is The Path To Innovation

MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Professor Anant Agarwal has personified the educator-entrepreneur, as he has had a foot in academe and a foot in new ventures for more than a decade. He has led CSAIL, MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, just as he was a founder of Tilera Corporation, which created the Tile multicore processor. He led the development of Raw, an early tiled multicore processor, Sparcle, an early multi-threaded microprocessor, and Alewife, a scalable multiprocessor. He also led the VirtualWires project at MIT and was the founder of Virtual Machine Works. His start-ups have largely been focused on his areas of research and areas of interest, but he had not focused on the education space itself until late 2011.

edX President Anant Agarwal

It was at that point that Agarwal taught what would become MITX’s first massive open online course (MOOC) on circuits and electronics, which drew 155,000 students from 162 countries. This overwhelming response showed the promise of having his academic and his entrepreneurial pursuits coincide. Agarwal developed a partnership between MIT and nearby Harvard to establish edX. Unlike rivals Coursera and Udacity, edX is a not-for-profit. Therefore, when Agarwal thinks about the competitive landscape among the MOOCs, his perspective is “the more the merrier.” In fact, in June of last year, edX became open sourced, and the source code, OpenedX, has led to interesting collaborations with Google, Stanford University, and even with countries such as France and China.

I spoke with Agarwal multiple times in recent months to ask him how edX is evolving, and what he foresees for the future of edX and for the academic institutions that they draw from.

(To hear an extended audio interview with Anant Agarwal, please visit this link. This is the seventh article in the Education Technology Innovation series. To read past interviews including interviews with the CEOs of Udacity, Coursera, and Khan Academy, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, click the “Follow” link above.)

Peter High: As edX enters its third year in existence, what key lessons have you drawn thus far?

Anant Agarwal: The power of edX and of MOOCs more generally is to democratize education. People want to learn no matter their circumstance or their age, and the experience of our students shows definitively that this is the case. We have many people who are in the workforce who use edX to develop new skills to employ in their jobs. Therefore, we are thinking more broadly.

A related example is our partnership with global steel manufacturer Tenaris. Through their adoption of the Open edX platform, Tenaris will enhance their existing training programs delivered through Tenaris University to nearly 27,000 employees worldwide. We have established a comparable relationship with the IMF.

We also have announced a partnership with Davidson College and the College Board to host Advanced Placement (AP) course modules for high school students, as well. So what began as university-centric idea is migrating to the pre and post university settings.

PH: Anant, please talk a bit about the genesis of edX.

AA: At MIT, we’ve been very heavily involved in online learning as a resource for 15 years starting with OpenCourseWare. In the early part of this decade, I played around with an online laboratory called WebSim. building an online platform where several hundred students from around the world would come and conduct experiments. I had always felt that I would be able to do online lab experiments, and then in late 2011, we decided to build a platform and put MIT courses online. We formed MITX and announced it in December of 2011.

The first course we offered was on ctircuits and electronics, and the response was staggeringly good as we had 155,000 students from all parts of the world take that course. This was a difficult course with differential equations as a pre-requisite, so the enrollment really surprised us. I spoke with others at MIT and at Harvard, and we decided to partner up launching edX as a collaboration between MIT and Harvard. We decided to expand the partnership, and then we worked with other universities offering courses on our platform.

PH: Were there any misgivings, especially in the early stage, about the extent to which this might cannibalize the existing offerings? Naturally these courses do not replicate the experience of being on MIT’s, Harvard’s, Berkeley’s, McGill’s, or Georgetown’s campuses, but at the same time, it is access to some of the professors that make those universities famous. Was the possibility considered that this was a something that was cannibalizing the value of these universities’ educations?

AA: The course material from MIT courses was already available to the public with thousands of courses on OpenCourseWare. OpenCourseWare was definitely very good for MIT, and good for the world. Therefore, there has been no real strong concern as to whether this would damage MIT’s or Harvard’s reputations. Rather we felt that increasing access to learning for students around the world was a very good thing to do. A major motivation was to re-invent how education happened on our own campuses, so that we could apply new technologies to learning and really reinvent how education happened on the campuses. Online learning is a huge disruptive force, and we certainly felt it was better for us to be part of it and to fuel it for both improving on campus education as well as increasing access beyond it. That is why we launched edX.

PH: How does edX change the educational experience for students who were on those campuses? For instance, for your MIT students’ part of this is access to materials and to university professors who are not at MIT but are part of edX. I assume also that part of the value is a foundation that is laid through the use of edX’s material that then can be built upon through the classroom setting. Is that a fair synopsis or at least a portion of the value intended?

AA: Absolutely. A big motivation for starting edX was to improve the campus experience. For example, lectures with online learning sequences are at extra places on campus with interactive exercises and virtual laboratories. Now the students can watch these on their own campuses in their own dorm rooms at their own time and pace. Just imagine, you can pause and rewind a lecture, which you can’t do in a classroom. You can watch this at midnight, and we find that the largest amount of access happens between midnight and 2:00 am.

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